A bad day for flying...

On Sunday we went out to Mark's parents house to celebrate his Mom's birthday.  Because the weather forecast called for perfect RC airplane flying weather Mark decided to bring all his airplanes.  The first plane he took up was his bi-plane, shown here when he first got it last year. 

After flying it for a bit he decided to do some fancy moves.  Bad idea.  The tail of this airplane has never been very stable, we bought it already built and it wasn't straight.  Mark took the biplane into a loop but when he went to pull out it went into a spin. Then it went into a nose dive straight into the ground, where it literally exploded into a million tiny slivers of wood.  Here is all that is left of the plane.

After such a poor start, I thought Mark would be done flying but he wanted to keep going.  Next he tried to fly his piper cub (the yellow one).  I should explain that Mark's parents drive way is pretty short as far as runways go, and there is a fence at the end of it.  Anyhow, he started the piper taking off only to find that the plane didn't respond to any of the controls.  He cut the engine and tried to land it but it didn't have enough airspeed, flipped over, and landed on it's wing, ripping the wing struts from the plane, tearing a hole in the wing covering and denting the front engine cover.  But at least this one is fixable.  I didn't get any pictures of this crash, I was in shock that he had crashed again.

Next up he flew the T-Craft (the little blue and white one).  This one flew perfectly, with no problems at all.  So, Mark decided to take his Extra up (this is the black one, that I gave him for Christmas) for it's maiden flight.  Mark started the take off roll, lifted off the ground, and... the engine died!  Because of the fence at the end of the runway Mark tried to turn the plane to the side.  The wing was ripped in half and the landing gear ripped off as well.  I didn't get a picture of this either.  It was simply to painful to see all that time and effort ruined in such a short time.  It is fixable, the fuselage is fine, but Mark has to rebuild the entire wing from scratch.

So, at the end of the day, Mark had 3 planes less than when he started.  What a rotten day for flying!